If I Had a Million Dollars…

The novel's first page opens with a printing press: built in the USSR in 1967, the same age as Karam, a machine whose quirks only he understands «because it is old and falling apart». Qaraqan immediately sets up the central metaphor: «In fact, this machine was Karam himself... Karam, too, felt like a citizen of a country that had died.» The hero is a «noble engineer» with a communist upbringing, who neither drinks nor smokes, who taught colleagues everything he knew and then watched them become his bosses — a representative of the generation that could not adapt to the new rules of the transition years.

The suitcase scene is the best part of the book. Karam sees the suitcase at two in the morning but does not take it: he calls out «Hey, owner of the suitcase...», invents a story that the owner is «relieving himself behind the columns», and waits until three, four, five o'clock. The author writes this hesitation as both funny and bitter — the moments when a man squeezed between conscience and poverty laughs at his own excuses ring true. In the morning a passing traffic policeman takes his last ten manats as a «fine», builders curse him and chase him away — and only then, in the lift, lifting the lid, does the «Oh my God!» come.

The first hours with the money are the novel's brightest pages. Karam counts two hundred bundles but «cannot multiply five thousand by two hundred»; he divides a million by thirty years and arrives at «three or four thousand dollars» a month; in the supermarket he realises for the first time that shopping means «not money shrinking but food multiplying». His wife Firuza's mother's recipe notebook, kept for years, the hundred manats needed to fix his son Kanan's teeth, his daughter Parvin walking about in flat shoes in midwinter — these small details show the humiliating everydayness of poverty far better than any sermon. Karam locking himself in the bedroom to sob with joy is a sincere and moving scene.

Then the genre shifts. Returning to the building site on the day he quits his job, Karam overhears workers talking about a bloody death, and all his joy turns to paranoia: he is afraid to look through the peephole, imagines a shoot-out between men in black jackets, and believes the money's owners are watching him. Qaraqan plays well with the reader here — the «film» scenarios Karam constructs are both convincing and comic; when the death turns out to be an ordinary workplace accident the tension eases, but the central question remains: who brings a million dollars to a building site at two in the morning?

The weaknesses are noticeable too. The author often stops the action for long social sermons: «now it's the donkeys who make the money», «in a big bazaar like Azerbaijan», «it wasn't like this in Soviet times». These views fit the character's outlook, but repeated they break the rhythm of the text. The female characters are also mostly described through Karam's eyes — «beautiful», «passionate», «romantic» — and Firuza's own voice is still weak. The nightmare scene (a severed hand in a dog's mouth) is striking but somewhat overly grotesque.

Even so, «If I Had a Million Dollars...» keeps its promise in the first third: a plain text close to spoken language, enlivened by local dialect and Russian phrases, conveys the atmosphere of 2010s Baku, and every decision the hero makes leaves the reader alone with the question «what would I have done?». The question on the back cover — «does money always bring happiness?» — is still open, but the first signs are unsettling.

• Third-person narration that often slips into the hero's inner monologue
• Short, numbered chapters
• Local dialect and Russian phrases in the dialogue